Gaming

Does Brexit affect Online Gaming?

Does Brexit affect Online Gaming?

With the coronavirus pandemic continuing to dominate world news, the many issues related to the coming Brexit deadline have taken a back seat. It’s looking more and more likely that the UK will be leaving the European Union without an extensive trade deal, so where does that leave the gambling industry?

One thing it will not impact is the safety of playing casino games online. All of the major providers will continue to provide safe online casino games for customers to play regardless of the outcome of the Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU.

The government does seem to have an agenda when it comes to gambling in the UK. Tom Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labour Party, was one of the first to put significant pressure on the gambling industry. This appears to have been continued by the current Conservative Government who, in April 2020, implemented a ban via the UK Gambling Commission preventing online gambling companies from allowing customers to use credit cards to gamble online.

The new restriction was brought in after a study conducted by the Gambling Commission, which found that people using credit cards to gamble online are more likely to suffer from problem gambling. While this may have a negative impact on the bottom line for bookmakers and online gaming providers, it will help to reduce the issue of problem gamblers in the UK.

While it is still unclear what kind of deal the UK is going to make with the EU once Brexit actually happens, it’s safe to assume that UK holidaymakers will find it much more difficult to access their favourite online gaming websites when in the EU. It will also raise many questions with regards to some of the UK’s biggest online gaming providers who have bases outside of mainland UK – namely Gibraltar and Malta.

We know that UK gambling providers set up bases in these countries for tax purposes, but what will happen if they are no longer able to do this? Will they move their operations back to the UK? What will that mean in terms of the services offered? All of these questions are impossible to answer at this moment in time, as we don’t know the details of the exit agreement in terms of these British Overseas Territories, but we can certainly speculate.

What is most likely to happen, if UK gambling providers do have to move their bases back to the UK, is that we would see a significant reduction in the amount of providers able to offer their services to players in the UK. The main reason for this would be the massive amounts of extra tax that providers would have to pay to the UK government if their operations were entirely based there. It could also result in many providers removing or reducing their new customer bonuses and bonuses for existing players, so it could hurt everyone involved. While we can only wait and see what happens to the gambling industry in the UK post-Brexit, one thing is for sure, the people of the UK will still be able to play online casino games. How much choice players will have and what bonuses will be available could be directly related to the deal the Government gets with the EU.

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